What do you find so bizarre, bird-brain?

By now you may have seen the story about the art-judging pigeons making the rounds. When I first read the story, I was amused, but thought little more of it than yet another study that showed that our "bird-brained" cousins happen to have a little more brains than we have given them credit for. Pigeons and crows, especially, have been shown to be particularly intelligent beasts,* so this latest study came as little surprise.

However, the title of the report that Drudge linked to is what has made me think a little more on this topic; the UK's Daily Mail calls the study "bizarre." What, exactly, is bizarre about it? The article doesn't bother to explain its conclusion that the study is bizarre, we the reader are supposed to have reached the same conclusion by default.

Yet, nothing is bizarre about it. There are two basic bits of information to come from this study: (1) Animals demonstrate something akin to intelligence--in that they are able to learn a task when trained with a food reward and (2) there exist qualities of an image that allow for consistent labeling. Possibly a third, that pigeons can do (2). Why is any one of these bizarre? We have known (1) for a while, and (2) only verifies that the visual systems of disparate species are able to be trained to identify the same characteristics. Apparently, birds see shape, color, texture, and their relative proportions, in the same way we do. That they can be trained to identify certain combinations as "good" or "bad" only re-affirms and expands upon our understanding of (1). Bizarre? I should assume that our scientist friends went into this study fully expecting the success of the pigeons.

There is, perhaps, a slightly more metaphysical angle to look at the study from. If we go so far as to assume that the birds were capable of actually identifying an aesthetic quality in each of the pictures, this has big implications for our conception of beauty. If some fundamental principles of aesthetic are hardwired in our DNA, it means that the concept of an aesthetic or proper arrangement had existed long before homo sapiens walked the earth and developed a language to express the concept.** It could be argued by theists that this is evidence that there is a divine conception of beauty that has been passed on to every living creature. It also comes to mind that our concepts of aesthetic are founded in very practical matters. Symmetry and balance, for example, are concepts that would tend to keep creatures away from things about to fall. Contrasts of light and dark would mean that a creature is viewing a scene where objects are more readily identified, whether they be friend, foe, or food. Emptiness is something to generally be avoided, as a creature heading into emptiness is heading away from food and toward being easier to spot as food. From these perspectives, suddenly the concepts of aesthetic begin to look more natural and less bizarre for animals to possess.

Have fun chewing on that, and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

*I'm not going to bother linking to anything here. Crows have made waves in the psychology and biology literature on more than one occasion, showing their ability to not only learn simple tasks, but to discover how to complete a complex series of tasks to solve a problem and have demonstrated the ability to remember how they solved previous problems. Pigeons, iirc, have fared similarly (but not quite as remarkably) well in other studies. Google is your friend, if you have doubts.
**Remember your Greek philosophy here: Concepts are quite capable of existing in the absence of words to describe them or thinkers to think them. They are immutable, even if undiscovered or forgotten.